1. He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special (1985)

From Bewitched to It's Always Sunny and South Park's 'Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo.'

Ah, Christmas. It's the time of year when we can count on three things: the temperature dropping, people becoming friendlier to each other in the spirit of the season, and those ads in which spouses buy expensive cars for each other and put giant bows on them. It's also the time of year for Christmas specials and holiday episodes of your favorite TV shows. We can all agree on the classics like Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but there's a lot of weird stuff that goes down on TV during the holiday season, too. In honor of the holiday specials that aren't quite part of the canon, here are 11 of the season's oddest TV episodes and specials. (Note: We've left out the Star Wars holiday special, which belongs in a category all its own.)

Just look at the title. Does it have to be explained? This 1985 special is a good example of a network thinking it can put any characters into a Christmas special, but even kids rolled their eyes when this aired.

I think there's a rule that every TV show has to have an episode that's a riff on A Christmas Carol (also It's a Wonderful Life). But unlike 1978's Rich Little's A Christmas Carol, most of them don't have a single person playing all of the parts. Not only does the master impressionist play every role in the classic Charles Dickens tale, he plays Scrooge as W.C. Fields, Bob Cratchit as Paul Lynde, Mrs. Cratchit as Edith Bunker, Jacob Marley as Richard Nixon, and the Ghost of Christmas Present as Peter Falk. You at least have to admire Little's ambition. Judge it for yourself above. The action starts around the 4:30 mark.

This classic episode of South Park is sort of like A Charlie Brown Christmas, with a big emphasis on the brown part. Kyle feels left out of the town's Christmas celebration and is visited by the title character. The Mr. Hankey Christmas song is the one we remember, but don't forget the other moments.

Sometimes a sitcom doesn't just want to give us a message, it wants to beat us over the head with it. This holiday episode of Bewitched is one of those episodes. Tabitha has a black friend named Lisa. Tabitha wants to be sisters with Lisa so badly that she casts a spell that gives Lisa white spots on her black face and gives Tabitha black spots on her white face. Things get even trickier when Darrin's client turns out to be a bigot and Samantha casts a spell on him so he sees everyone as black. If it sounds strange, the episode was written by several students of a high school English class at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles.

You can probably tell that this holiday special is odd from the cast list alone. It's a wondrous artifact of the 1980s, starring Mr. T, Emmanuel Lewis, Maureen McGovern, Willie Tyler and Lester the puppet, skaters Randy Gardner and Tai Babilonia, and magician David Copperfield. Cheesy? Perhaps, but I'd actually love to see something like this done today. Emmanuel Lewis even even gets to sing and dance!

Have you ever thought to yourself, "Hey, I'd really love to see Keanu Reeves and Drew Barrymore in a Christmas special in which they sing an ode to Cincinnati, Ohio"? Then this 1986 TV movie is for you. And if that wasn't enough, Pat Morita plays Santa Claus!

More evidence that every TV show has to do an episode that riffs on Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. In The Six Million Dollar Man's version, all Steve Austin wants to do is celebrate the holidays with his good buddy Oscar, but Oscar has an assignment for him involving space company owner Budge (aka Scrooge) and his worker Bob Crandall (aka... well, you know). Can Steve use his bionic powers to save Christmas? Yes, of course he can.

You knew that The X-Fileswasn't going to do an ordinary holiday episode, and this turns out to be just as creepy and bloody as you'd expect. Mulder and Scully investigate a house haunted by a married couple (played by Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin). The ghosts confuse and manipulate Mulder and Scully to the point where the agents try to kill each other. After almost bleeding to death on the floor of the haunted house, the agents exchange Christmas gifts.

This episode, which originally aired on Christmas night, isn't odd in the way the other shows on this list are odd. It's a fairly routine story of Fred becoming a department-store Santa and learning that there is a real Santa and that he needs help delivering gifts. It's on this list, though, because how exactly did they celebrate Christmas in prehistoric times? I have a lot of questions about the timeline and the world of The Flintstones itself, but I guess it's a moot point when we're discussing a show with talking birds, TV sets made out of stone, and cars that run on the power of feet.

This is on the list because two things really stand out: 1) The scene in which Gob freaks out on his employees at the Christmas party and fires everyone, and 2) The scenes in which George Michael and Lindsay (nephew and aunt) and also Michael and Maeby (uncle and niece) sing "Afternoon Delight" to each other, before realizing what exactly the lyrics are saying.

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